Luis G said:
Yes but no, as i see it, socialism is just another way to ensure that people have a job and can earn enough to live. It supresses social classes by ensuring that everybody has the same level of wealth.
Yes, socialism is a means of dividing up wealth. It assumes that the wealth will be there regardless, and that the only question is how it should be distributed. What it neglects to consider is that wealth has to be created, and that the driving force behind the creation of wealth is the individual human mind. A man comes up with an idea to increase production, he puts the idea into effect and then the socialist comes along and says, "you have too much wealth. You're depriving your fellow man of his fair share, so we have to take away your wealth and give it to the less fortunate," i.e., those who either weren't intelligent enough to come up with the idea, or motivated enough to put the idea into practice. Socialism destroys the incentive to strive for greater production. It makes people equal by making them all poor.
Capitalism is a system that encourages the production of wealth, by allowing those who produce to keep what they produce. It's goal is not economic equality, but economic justice. Each person gets what he has earned based on what he contributes to the production of wealth. The method by which this is achieved is purely negative: people contract freely with each other in the economy, and they are the ones who decide how much a person's production is worth. The government takes no position on how much people deserve, it simply enforces the contracts that they negotiate, and prevents anyone from taking another person's wealth by force or fraud.
Luis G said:
However, i think there should be a modification to that approach and leave the decision of either working or not to the individual.
Do you mean that people should receive an income whether they work or not?